Editor's note: This story was originally published in November 2013. We're bringing it back in light of Monday's news that Coleman, a Cowboys running back from 1993-94, went missing. Click here for the latest on that.

It was already one heck of a story line. But it could have been even better.

Lincoln Coleman, the former Home Depot worker and Dallas schoolboy, rushing for 57 yards and leading the Cowboys to victory through sleet and snow on Thanksgiving Day. It had the makings of a tantalizing tale, and it was only seconds away from being completed. Then Leon Lett touched a dead ball, Pete Stoyanovich booted a game-winning field goal, Miami prevailed and the Hollywood script was scrapped.

Twenty years after the 16-14 loss to the Dolphins in November 1993, Coleman is a footnote in Cowboys history along with being a recovered drug and alcohol abuser, an addiction professional and a one-time folk hero in Dallas.

Coleman’s road to the NFL wasn’t easy. His path after it was just as difficult.

Long before players like Nick Hayden, Ernie Sims and George Selvie went from the unemployment line to contributors for the Cowboys, there was Coleman, a real man of the people.

“When a guy was coming off the street in our era, he was really coming off the street,” said former Dallas fullback Daryl Johnston, now a Fox NFL analyst. “I didn’t know Lincoln Coleman. I had no idea who Lincoln Coleman was.”

These days, Coleman, 44, has once again receded from the spotlight that shined on him ever so briefly. He is back in Dallas, where he returned to live this month. The homecoming has taken place more than two years after he entered a Florida treatment center to win the battle against cocaine and booze that had ravaged his life.

Today, he helps run I Am Somebody, a nonprofit organization designed to help people who have suffered the same problems Coleman has endured.

“If I want to stay healthy, if I want to stay clean, if I want to stay sober, then I have to give back what was so freely given to me,” Coleman said.

But in football, Coleman rarely had anything handed to him. At Notre Dame, he was denied a chance to play exclusively at running back — the position he starred at in high school at Bryan Adams. So he eventually transferred to Baylor.

After college, Coleman tried to forge a pro career. He played for the semipro Dallas Colts and later the Dallas Texans of the Arena League. In January 1993, while he was still making $10 an hour at a Home Depot store in Richardson, he joined friends to watch the Cowboys defeat Buffalo in Super Bowl XXVII.

An NFL job, which Coleman dreamed about, remained elusive. But the opportunity he always coveted would arrive sooner than expected. And it came about in unlikely fashion after Cowboys trainer Kevin O’Neill watched a televised Texans game by happenstance and came away impressed with their big, burly 255-pound runner.

Joe Brodsky, the Cowboys’ running backs coach at the time, was searching for a camp body. Upon hearing O’Neill’s recommendation, Brodsky and the Cowboys zeroed in on Coleman. They eventually signed him to a two-year, $250,000 contract on his Aug. 12 birthday.

“They hustled me in, put some shoulder pads on me and pants, and everybody is out there on the field stretching,” he said. “I am looking around at the No. 1 defense in the NFL from the year before. Just won the Super Bowl. I am looking at Tony Casillas, [Charles] Haley, [Tony] Tolbert, Robert Jones, [Ken] Norton. I am looking at all these guys and Jimmy Johnson.”

Michael Ainsworth/Staff Photographer

Former Dallas Cowboys running back Lincoln Coleman, pictured at his childhood home in Dallas on November 26, 2013. (Michael Ainsworth/The Dallas Morning News)

Coleman had just joined a team stocked with talent that included Emmitt Smith, the future Hall of Famer who would become the game’s all-time leading rusher. Buried on the depth chart, he didn’t play in the first 10 games. In fact, he wasn’t even on the active roster until Nov. 17 — eight days before the Cowboys played the Dolphins. But then Smith bruised his right quadriceps in a Nov. 21 loss at Atlanta, raising doubts about his status against Miami.

The door cracked for Coleman. And as the wintry mix caked the field at Texas Stadium on Thanksgiving Day 1993, Coleman made his NFL debut in the second quarter, relieving Smith and plowing ahead for 41 yards on six carries during Dallas’ lone touchdown drive that day.

“A guy that size going downhill — that’s kind of a perfect scenario for him with the conditions that were there that day,” Johnston said.

It did seem ideal even though he had played in heavy snow only once before.

For his efforts, Coleman became a bit of a folk hero. And his popularity immediately exceeded his productivity. He gained only 255 more yards during his tenure with the Cowboys before being released in July 1995 after he objected to head coach Barry Switzer’s demand that he shed 20 pounds. That year he began using cocaine and had become, in his words, arrogant, telling strength and conditioning coach Mike Woicik, “I’m not a football player. I am an entertainer.”

He eventually landed with the Atlanta Falcons but never played in a regular-season game with them and was cut in 1996. A return to arena football followed before his career dissolved in 2001 with little fanfare and no Hollywood ending.

But 12 years after his playing days stopped, Coleman is doing fine. His drug and alcohol addiction is a thing of the past, and he’s as happy as he was on that day 20 years ago in the sleet and snow.